Abstract
The Boat People by Sharon Bala, Blue Sunflower Startle by Yasmin Ladha, and Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, by Denise Chong, are texts that engage with vulnerability as it relates to immigration, one of the most precarious of states or sites that Canadian literature chronicles. The abstract and concrete politics of adaptation are exemplified in these narratives of displacement, inspired by the Tamil refugee crisis of 2009–2010, the Indo-Tanzanian immigration wave of the 1970s, and the resourcefulness of Chinese immigrant families in the mid-twentieth century. These narratives effectively investigate vulnerability within spaces of interconnection, imprisonment, relation, visibility, and transformation. This paper works with their explorations of the Canadian trope of immigration as a process that moves from the vulnerability of strangeness to the vulnerability of adaptation to the vulnerability of commitment. Addressing the ways that these stages are subverted, the paper examines the extent to which migrancy and its resolution resist a “national” narrative in these texts, undercutting the prototype of success through adversity. How they model Hirsch’s “openness to unexpected outcomes” recites the complexity of their depictions of vulnerability.
Keywords
Introduction
The desire to locate Canadian stories of immigration as enactments of vulnerability tempts both interpretation and its ricochet. The effect is that many texts exploring that issue are subtly obliged to mimic the position of asylum seeker, obediently performing a textual litany of difficulty, pain, and impuissance in order to fulfil the expectations of powerlessness that pre-occupy this common leitmotif. Writing focused on transplanted Canadians enacts a dour expectation of suffering, intolerance, bureaucracy, and, if not trauma, then certainly adversity. To arrive then at agency and promise as possible destinations appears counterintuitive if not unlikely. If all Canadian writing that details migrancy (whether immigrant, refugee, or alien newcomer experience) evolves from a postulation of wretchedness, the freedom of any text to enact its own agency suffers curtailment. If this genre must necessarily reflect circumstances of difficulty, hostility, and oppression, and if discrimination is a thematic given, then those prose works that tentatively gesture toward resistance unsettle far more than those that reinscribe a recital of otherness and suffering. If agency is a suspect category and exposure an a priori condition, the creative possibilities of engaged vulnerability are reduced to a delusional miscalculation. Resistance is futile, agency is illusory, and the “success story” that contributes to Canada’s “multicultural fairy tale” (Kamboureli, 2000: 86) must conflict with the complex politics of adaptation. How, then, to read stories that refuse to live on their knees, refuse to succumb to the very vulnerability that they expose? How should we read narratives determined to probe instability and doubt as transformative? If, as Marianne Hirsch says, “an acknowledgement of vulnerability, both shared and produced, can open a space of interconnection, as well as a platform for responsiveness” (2019: n.p.), surely stories of immigration offer opportunity to explore exactly that responsiveness. The texts under scrutiny in this article probe that conundrum and discrepancy. They puzzle out affirmative modalities even while they depict implacably dissentient contestations. The Boat People by Sharon Bala, Blue Sunflower Startle by Yasmin Ladha, and Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance by Denise Chong all engage with specific examples of exposure as it relates to immigration, one of the most precarious of sites that Canadian literature chronicles. Arbitrary as their catoptric ecologies are, these examples examine both the experience of othering that accompanies displacement, and the possibilities attending an aesthetic examination of that exposure.
The Boat People is a novel inspired by the historical actuality of 550 Tamil refugees who “arrived on the coast of British Columbia” (Bala, 2018: 391) in October 2009 and August 2010, fleeing sectarian violence in Sri Lanka. 1 Lives of the Family collects 12 narrative essays about various Chinese Canadian families who settled in small-town central Canada in the middle of the twentieth century. Finally, Blue Sunflower Startle traces the migrations of an Indo-Tanzanian Canadian who seeks security in love — love for a place, “the prairies” (Ladha, 2010: 84). 2 These texts are shaped by “moments when the forces of history, politics and family combined to bring that immigrant experience into sharp relief” (Chong, 2013: 4). 3 While it is impossible to totalize the experience of migration within the Canadian lens, in their approach all instantiate similar vulnerabilities within diverse temporalities. All address the precarity of security in a country that is both sanctuary and purgatory. They explore a quintessential Canadian trope: immigration as a process that moves from the stark vulnerability of strangeness to the contingent vulnerability of adaptation to the protracted (ultimately rewarding) vulnerability of commitment. It could be argued that triumphalism taints this “national” narrative, the seductive arc of resolution overcoming adversity to enjoy success. These three texts serve as prototypes that explore and undercut that expectation. They engage with Hirsch’s “embodied openness” (2019: n.p.) in a context of difficulty, detention, and desire, ultimately making out of their vulnerabilities not stoicism but promise.
Imprisonment
Waiting, that terrible hiatus, may be the worst of all vulnerabilities, and Lives of the Family, Blue Sunflower Startle, and The Boat People investigate the suspension of waiting as a key aspect of helplessness. Only action can alleviate that deceptive cul-de-sac. Arrest and detention impose stasis, and movement becomes the incentive and desire encircling these narratives, suggesting a responsive potential once each of the bodies depicted are allowed to engage.
The incarceration of migrants, and especially children, is a primary focus in The Boat People. A refugee father separated from his child, the main character, Mahindan, is a Tamil mechanic. He has managed to survive the warfare and violence, hunger, and intimidation of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Widowed, a young son his only surviving family, he somehow buys a spot for himself and the boy on an illegal cargo ship, which lurches across the ocean to Vancouver, Canada. Believing Canada to be a country of justice and fairness, the 500 asylum seekers on that ship expect immediate refuge. Instead, they are met with suspicion, misunderstanding, and a deliberately slow and cumbersome immigration system handicapped by sweeping assumptions about Tamil Tigers, illegality, terrorism, and suicide attacks.
The novel details how the characters negotiate the complexities of detention, processing, government regulations, news reports, and investigative immigration arms — in short, the entire apparatus of state, law, and enforcement as instruments of permission. In light of their illegal status, those seeking safety and family unity become only residually human, chess pieces in a losing game. Their interspersing perspectives enable the narrative to examine vulnerability from different angles. Mahindan, the refugee father, is bewildered, confused, and utterly powerless. He managed to buy a place on the boat only through sheer desperation. He understands no English; his young son is put into foster care; and he is haunted by the blood-stained bargains he was forced to make in order to escape Sri Lanka. He is the most vulnerable character, but in having gambled all, he is also invulnerable, for he has the least to lose. Surrounded by Canadian characters (lawyer, translator, adjudicator) who represent the multicultural origins of so many settlers, Mahindan shadows their work, reminding them of the insecurity that they believe they have transcended.
Chong’s Lives of the Family anticipates Canadian rejection and detention as well, especially because so many mid-twentieth century Chinese were members of “paper families” (5), invented or non-nuclear, so that a consistent story becomes the real test for these migrants. As Chong writes: “For Chinese wives and children hoping to emigrate from China to Canada after 1949, much depended on their performance at an interview with Canadian Immigration Officials” (12). Always anticipating rejection, the “interview” mirrors the detention hearings in The Boat People, with every effort being made to trip up the applicants, who must rely on their ability to repeat an undeviating narrative:
The official showed no hint that she suspected they might not be telling the full truth. Fay-oi did not volunteer that her father, Harry Lim, had two wives, or that her mother, the first wife, was not the young woman being interviewed with her. (13)
The contingencies of political unrest incite these negotiations with “fate and circumstance”, survival and social unease swirling together.
In Blue Sunflower Startle, Ladha chronicles the rise of Idi Amin and his wanting “Ugandan-Indians out, like pronto, clear off!” (75). The Ugandan crisis spilled over into Tanzania, a country which also began to harass Indo-Tanzanians. Recognizing that they are unwanted incites “the beginning of the exodus” (75) of Indo-Tanzanians from East Africa. Ladha’s grandfather, incorrigible “hazmat, a danger to their lives” (63), persists in critiquing President Nyerere, and “twice he is put in jail for inciting against the President” (63). Surviving jail, he nevertheless does not survive life, dying of cancer. Ladha’s mother then starts “the immigration process” (77) to Canada, fleeing persecution and running toward a more promising future.
Such political fomentations push certain populations towards an impetus that no laws or edicts can stabilize. But as these three texts demonstrate, that moment of desperation and decision, the resolve to migrate or seek safety, is aroused by variations on necessity. Infiltrated by urgency, subsequent decisions enter a complex discourse infused with convolution. Whether lies or dodges, outright declarations or soft fabrications, the vulnerable other must embroider expectation with explanation. The story then, the “official story” of “fate and circumstance”, needs to manoeuvre multiple jeopardies and their unpredictable outcomes, the ultimate vulnerability of living a story that is being invented while it is lived.
One of the key chapters in The Boat People, entitled “Jeopardy”, plays with the presence of that eponymous television show, from which the incarcerated migrants learn rudimentary English. “Jeopardy meant danger, but it also meant prizes” (196), thinks Mahindan. He recognizes that he is trapped by his situation, that dates and details, deaths and detentions together weave an insecurity that denotes real danger. “Jeopardy” is the stratagem these migrants must play, having had few choices about their actions. Questioned about his background, his having repaired vehicles for the insurrectionist Tigers suggesting he was connected to them, Mahindan realizes that his interlocutors have no concept of having to choose between two untenable alternatives, both of which put people’s lives at risk, the maximum vulnerability of gambling all.
If we had not taken part in the celebrations, the cadres would have beat us up, forced me to join them. Did she not know what it was like to have so little agency? To be faced with such cruel options it was as if there was no choice at all? These Canadians, with their creature comforts, had such meagre imaginations. (194)
The lawyer representing Mahindan declares, “As a civilian making a living in a Tiger-controlled area, my client had no choice but to do work for the LTTE” (198). In the abstract and out of context, every action can be construed as choice, and thus attached to guilt or innocence. But in the physical and temporal moment of coercion, “there was never a good option” (198) for Mahindan. And when the government lawyer declares, “In repairing an LTTE-owned bus, he was party to a war crime” (199), Mahindan faces the most pernicious precarity of all, an obtuse lack of knowledge on the parts of the legal and social systems of Canada represented by individuals who think in terms only of right or wrong, and who are unable to imagine the binary narrative that presents two more complicated choices: live or die.
If the circumstances driving the families in Chong’s text are somewhat less blunt, they too are buffeted by multiple uncertainties, losses of both property and lives:
People preferred to deal in silence with what was happening to family in China, now that the Communists […] had imposed Land Reform on the south. If anything, others thought Jasper Hum ought to be thankful to have escaped with his life — unlike some other husbands. (105)
That combination of silence and sufferance embeds itself in the ongoing absence of information from China that the sojourners in Canada weigh against their relative safety. When Jasper Hum finally learns that that “his brother had died at the hands of the Communists, that his sister-in-law had killed herself, and that everything that he’d spent his life […] working for was lost” (110), he succumbs to a despondency that is only remedied when his wife and children are finally able to reunite with him in Canada in 1957. The desire for reunification becomes the cusp of resistance, the family measuring the resilience of hope.
Relational
These works amplify the vulnerability and resonance of “family” as power and refuge. While a stretched and stressed concept, not only as an instrument of organization, but as a fraught structure that intercepts societal and governmental instruments of law, permission, and acceptance, family serves as potent querencia. Not one family in these texts is “traditional”, their variant vulnerability enabling them to gesture toward the complexity of the jeopardies they live. All address the connection between an immigrant community and the problematic lacuna of family circumstances set against the background of Canadian culture’s own conventional dictates. All seek to open up notions of disguise and exposure related to racialization and the systemic chauvinisms of Canada. All engage with the slippery impositions of legal status.
Blue Sunflower Startle dispenses with any notion of traditional family structure. After the death of first her father and then her grandfather, the narrator observes how her grandmother and mother plan and work toward inventing a completely new life:
Grandfather is diagnosed with cancer. He does not fight tooth and nail like Father. He says he is done. He is not going to leave Africa to move anywhere else. Grandmother keeps quiet. But Mother has plans […]. She tells us, “We are going to Canada. I think soon.” (76)
Selling all they have, including property and gold — “This money quietly reaches Canada before we do” (77) — the Ladha family (which now consists of grandmother, mother, narrator, and her younger brother) undertake a journey of transformation without, it seems, regret. “Grandmother’s journey with Grandfather is done. Who looks back at the ferry boat from which one has dis-embarked? Not Grandmother. Done. Done. Done. She is on another shore, on another journey, in another reincarnation” (79). Still, precarity dogs lapsed memories, deliberate obfuscations, and erasures. In The Boat People, Mahindan’s immigration lawyer, Priya Rajasekaran, a second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian whose family were migrants from an earlier period, is an articling lawyer. She is reluctant to focus on immigration and refugees, and would prefer to shed her history and to work in corporate law. Her family’s political background is as fraught as Mahindan’s, but time in Canada has obscured the details. Grace Nakamura, a third-generation Japanese Canadian immigration adjudicator, who is being pressured by a government minister to find most of the Sri Lankan refugees “unsuitable”, is a product of the historical period of Japanese Canadian internment. However, she has relegated her grandparents’ mistreatment to a murky past she is reluctant to revisit, even when her elderly mother forces the issue and insists on raising the question of Japanese redress. These characters’ pasts augment Mahindan’s situation, which effectively challenges the Canadian mythology of being a safe haven for refugees.
Chong’s text gathers multiple stories of migrant Chinese families, most of whom moved to Ontario, a geographically specific reading chronicling how these immigrants or “sojourners” pivot when “the forces of history, politics and family combined to bring [that] immigrant experience into sharp relief” (4). Their multiple migrancies underscore their tenuous footing, for the movement of migrant within immigrant becomes a mantra for the 12 stages of fate and circumstance that Chong chooses to frame in these biographical essays: “Arrival, Layers, Obstacles, Opportunity, Between, Fortitude, Ambition, Outcomes, Resolve, Lives, Home, and Arrival” (2). The repetition of “arrival” as conclusion circles back to the ouroboros of newcomer experience, the recognition that every arrival is also a departure. The two cannot be differentiated, which emphasizes the uncertainty of both.
The struggles depicted in Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance accrete the hardship attending immigration but concentrate on Chinese immigrant “family” filiations as they are altered by multiple historical moments. In contrast, the struggles in Bala’s The Boat People depict family history as it is altered by survival. In Blue Sunflower Startle, Ladha interprets both exile and solace within family ties. All provide a lens through which to regard the most intense of precarious incentives: that social group we slap onto a diverse and complicated range of relationships — namely the family, those claimed and those repudiated.
Chong describes the trajectory of the narratives she gathers in Lives of the Family as a staggering movement: “The path they take lurches — it starts, it stops, even reverses in the face of happenstance and events unforeseen and amid a churning mix of setback and achievement” (7). The triumphalist arc of the official Canadian immigration story is arrival, adjustment, advancement, achievement, and affluence. This is supposed to be an incline leading to all that is auspicious, although there is some concession that this diegesis can take several generations. But Chong’s invocation of “lurching”, its faltering progress and clumsy stumbling, is in more accurate concordance with the migrant experience, whether refugee or immigrant. Tortured by the fluctuating barricades of bureaucracy, law, public opinion, labour shortages, and survival, the newcomer is caught in a relentless game of snakes and ladders.
Tied to this stumbling progress is the shifting ménage of family within and without the official mechanisms that instrumentalize legality and taxonomy in Canada. In The Boat People, as a widower who has lost every member of his family except his young son, Mahindan seeks connection but is also wary because he knows how provisory family can be. Of all his yearnings for freedom, especially for freedom from violence and fear, his greatest desire is to be united with his child, Sellian, and as he waits in detention, he suffers from their prolonged separation. Most painful is the moment when he is told that the authorities have decided that his son will be temporarily placed in a Canadian foster home. “He felt the impotence of his rage. Already Sellian had been taken, and no one had asked his permission or even his opinion” (176). If there is any happy resolution for Mahindan, it will be less dependent on the successful outcome to his admissibility hearing than on reunification with his child.
At a time when the Chinese Immigration Act (also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act) was in force, the disruption of family, with wives and children prohibited from immigrating to join their fathers and husbands, created a confusing churn. This maelstrom was magnified by the weight of debt related to the head tax and the requirement to send money home to families in China. In Lives of the Family, when “Canada permitted Chinese immigration again under its ‘Rules for Asiatics’”, “Chinese men holding Canadian citizenship could sponsor wives and underage children” (5), resulting in the entirely predictable illegal trade in “paper families” (5). Chong summarizes these developments with editorial detachment, but the stories that she gathers are not emotionless. The families that form and re-form, that revise themselves through marriage and adoption, restructure what family was into family shaped by pragmatism, a reshaping that while genuine enough, apes the expectations of definable family more than blood relation itself:
In the wake of the Canadian government’s lifting of exclusion, new Chinese immigrants arrived with an identity that was determined by the connection that got them into the country: as a wife or a dependent child reuniting with a husband or parent, or promised as a bride. These identities suggested that the familial relationship was the referee of their lives. In reality family stories set against the tragic and sometimes brutal history of the previous decades had been sagas of loss and dislocation. So, given the opportunity, someone resourceful might try to realign fractures in the family narrative to restore or recast the original, or construct a new one. To do so, however, might compel one to unearth memory. Or alternatively, to bury memory. (35–36)
Here the vulnerability of the migrant or the refugee faces a structural narrative determined to insist on its a priori paradigm. “Fate and circumstance”, as Chong indicates, measure the migrant experience far more than the official outline of the nuclear family as a basic social unit. Chong includes a number of instances of migrants memorizing the details of a family they did not know and were not part of in order to pass as a relative and thus enter Canada. Taking on a disguise (or telling one’s story slant) to forge a new future is virtually if not legally encouraged. And the connection between an immigrant community and its history — familial or political — defers to the systemically simplistic idea that there is but one “relational” story.
Chinese immigrant children of the era that Chong invokes, although cherished, become pawns, are bartered and married off, substituted and subject to family transactions regarding their future. Most of all, they have little leisure time and are required to contribute both to the family and within the family business. In the chapter entitled “Outcomes”, Chong focuses on the unforgiving parameters of work:
The Lors couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t have to work at the restaurant. From the age of four or five, they were required to help with the laundry, done in the basement. The younger ones shook out the wet linen napkins, the older siblings hung them alongside the tablecloths on the clothesline. As the children became capable of heavier work, like washing, and then dangerous work, like ironing, their chores increased. Upstairs at the restaurant, they folded napkins, laid tablecloths and set the tables. When they could add and subtract, they worked the cash register. If they were too short to reach, they stood on a chair. When they were older still, they waited on tables, not only on weekends, but after school and, on very busy days, over the lunch hour. (141)
The survival that impels this household obligation sounds through these narratives with insistent repetition. Work, the urgency of toil, carries the migrant forward. In The Boat People, Mahindan, incarcerated and waiting for admissibility, yearns to be able to work. “Every day he passed in this jail was another day he wasted fretting about Sellian instead of searching for a job[…] He missed doing the work he was good at — repairing brake lines, diagnosing faulty transmissions” (96). The mantra of “Learn English, get a job, find a small place to live” (29) becomes a recitation of desire, a hope for some future, however precarious. By contrast, the Mother in Blue Sunflower Startle attacks work as if it were “a honey pour” (85):
Yes, Mother set things in motion. She was not going to step inside the laundry room at The Four Seasons to wash semen off guests’ sheets for the fabled Canadian job experience. In two days, she would land a clerical job, teach herself to type, and eventually move up to the post of an administrative assistant in a big insurance office downtown Calgary. (86)
The jouissance that Ladha returns to in this “startle” love story of reinvented life refuses a romanticization of service but also does not fail to celebrate work’s grounding effect. That desire and capacity expresses “an embodied enactment” (Butler, 2016: 22) as proof of these bodies recognizing their precarious positions. Embracing work as dissent and defiance accompanies migrancy’s necessary transformation.
Visibility
Work and its outcomes, safety and security, go hand in hand with salient conspicuousness. Even overwhelmed and incarcerated and atomized, exposure proposes visuality and visibility as exhibition, clarification, and resolution. Certainly, visibility is inescapable. Chong begins Lives of the Family with what might be read as a disingenuous observation:
We were the only Chinese among the families living at the Prince George airport, in housing provided for employees. In reflecting on our experience, I need reminding of our initial surprise at having our attention called — through name-calling and taunts — to our being Chinese. (1)
The requirement of identifiable ethnicity continues to haunt expectation. “‘You don’t look Chinese’”, says a painter to Marion Lim when she responds to “his classified ad seeking a Chinese model” (195). The duel between expectation and appearance forms archaeological layers in Canadian culture, the unease of perception when what is seen does not equate with what is expected.
There is the first layer of vulnerability that both migrant and audience must negotiate: the look versus the regard. In an early encounter depicted in The Boat People, between Mahindan and Canadian officials, he evaluates their mien: “They had dark skin and hair. The interpreter had a gold stud in the side of her right nostril. The lawyer wore the pendant of a thali close against her throat. They looked Tamil but carried themselves like Canadians” (30). Carriage separates the newcomer and the officials. The puzzle of the totalizing look both inhibits and inspires the ranking that identification seeks to manage. “‘The Minister is of the opinion that all these brown people look exactly the same, which is to say, like terrorists’” (116), declares the lawyer who is trying to sort out the refugees’ claims. The tendency to believe the worst (as coded by appearance) is apparent in the politicians’ stated expectation: “Five hundred illegals arrive en masse, having destroyed their documents, and it’s impossible to identify them or separate the legitimate from the criminals” (342), says the minister, speechifying his belief. That blur of “impossibility” underscores the extreme vulnerability of visibility, even in a multi-visible culture where diversity abounds, and there is a pretense of its celebration. That same undisguisable difference becomes then aspiration, the surprise of conversion. Before his immigration hearing, Mahindan watches his son walk away with two Canadian women and observes “all three in jeans and T-shirts, appearing for all the world as if they belonged to each other. As if they belonged” (387; emphasis in original). The yearning to “belong” then strengthens Mahindan’s readiness to meet his interrogators, and to confront their sceptical regard of his legitimacy.
Appearance haunts Blue Sunflower Startle as well. Ladha recounts one moment when she and her family are travelling to Canada:
Flying […] on Air France with Grandmother, Brother, and Mother, I wore a new pink crimplene suit and, like a Bedouin, carted all the gold I could on my body. My neck and arms shining with gold. The Tanzanian government permitted us to leave with $200 each, I think. I cannot remember now, but it was a paltry sum. Back then, in the 1970s, pilots walked up and down the aisles, hosts of their airplanes. Seeing the mound of gold on my body, one of them did a double take. (85)
That double take resists the expectation of poverty or abjection, becomes instead a demonstration of physically apparent strategy, a camouflage. How to carry one’s wealth if one cannot carry money is less a question of abjection than practicality, although both signal the vulnerability of the migrant body.
But the body of an immigrant is not its only betrayal. Encounters with an entirely new climate and weather single out newcomers, subjecting them to relentless scrutiny. Ladha recounts seeing “a middle-aged immigrant standing on an icy patch [in a parking lot], […] petrified” (92) and expresses her understanding of this mirror image of her own alienation and vulnerability:
No official or judge will witness this singular moment. He has left behind property, degradation, and death. He rises from his plane seat, ready to prove up, this way kiss the ground. To find a way around the icy patch would be deception […] He is so capable. But that was in Tanzania. Here, in an icy parking lot, the immigrant feels the mad glitter of ice ready to split his bones to hair. (92)
Her observation of the man is sympathetic but still covert, respectful of his dignity. “I turn away. This man must not see me. There is no calamity more painful than another immigrant observing your cap-in-hand misery” (93). Being observed, observing oneself, and knowing the inadequacy of integration, especially given the terrifying precarity of inexperience, is the unkindest exposure of all.
Transformation
In “Immigrant writing: Changing the contours of a national literature”, Bharati Mukherjee asks how any immigrant can “renounce her earlier self, her fidelity to family history and language ‘without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion’?” (2011: 681). Mukherjee’s formulation of migrancy in the United States is articulated by what she terms “literature of new arrival”, a literature that rejects assimilation, embraces hybridity, and “centers on the nuanced process of rehousement after the trauma of forced or voluntary unhousement” (2011: 683; emphasis in original). Her analysis is profoundly relevant to the situations catechized in The Boat People, Blue Sunflower Startle, and Lives of the Family. These texts explore the tenuousness that is “unhousement”: “the breaking away from the culture into which one was born and in which one’s place in society was assured” (Edwards, 2009: 19). They also approach the intense uncertainty when migration is prompted by economic or security reasons. Although Lives of the Family catalogues variations on rehousement, “the rerooting of oneself in a new culture” (Edwards, 2009: 19), The Boat People depicts a far more contingent space. It will take a long time — possibly a lifetime — for Mahindan to reroot himself. There is a vast gap between him and “chosen” immigrants, those who have undergone selection and screening. Refugees whose argument for asylum is suspect or unprovable demonstrate the shaded narratives of people having to flee for their lives, driven by violence or starvation. No one is more embodied as vulnerable than a refugee from a mistrusted place. No one is more precarious than a person subject to arbitrary hunger and violence. The naked effects are predictable: survival is forced to step around family, law, and politics. Survival must refuse vulnerability as a luxury that cannot be sustained, keep it in abeyance for a time when it can once again visit.
The struggle for food and shelter, and most of all for safety, make for the elements of an overarching narrative implicitly linked to Canadian migrancy by its precarity. Although the hyphenated Canadian has been thoroughly discussed and debunked as a convenient stigmatization (see Myrna Kostash’s “How I lost my hyphen and found my groove” [2007]), the competing prepositions of refugee and migrant, asylum seeker and immigrant, circle back, over and over, to a conundrum of power and magnanimity in tension with one another. To what extent does a Canadian mythology demand that refugees and immigrants should perform as “modern pioneers”, and how does that expectation code the avidity with which the suffering of migrants is regarded? Can they escape their external determination of “refugeehood” or exclusion? And in accepting that unsteady myth, do Canadians expect it to be replayed?
The Boat People, Blue Sunflower Startle, and Lives of the Family introduce other necessary questions. How do these narratives bolster and replenish the prurient expectation of refugee horror stories, the experiences of a person either tortured or mistreated in the place they fled from? Is this narrative preferred to the more geographical portrayal of being “out of place”? On the other hand, how do these different explorations refuse abjection and resist the temptation to wallow in misery, even while depicting serious trauma and pain? In Blue Sunflower Startle, the question is broached overtly, as if a display of vulnerability were weak or whingeing. Ladha says she and her brother “shake our heads in amazement when an uncle or aunty from Tanzania would take their sniffling stand. In Canada, they were either hard-done-by or they would hold up their forever-and-a-day generic racist card, limp with overuse” (137). The impatience of the new generation in the face of racism becomes a matter of discrepant resistance, but does not diminish the real tracings of physical, emotional, economic, and social vulnerability.
These characters understandably suffer despondency, even at times despair. There are suicides in all three texts, the reasons not at all inexplicable. On the boat, an exhausted Mahindan counts off those family members he has lost; “The roll call of the dead lulled him to sleep” (Bala, 2018: 3). Although characters in Blue Sunflower Startle, Lives of the Family, and The Boat People all carry a “roll call of the dead”, it is important to acknowledge that it is sometimes the dead who provide the vulnerable living with incentive. The precarious situations of these people defy what I would define as “traumatage”, written texts that luxuriate in affliction and that make misery the core of narrative exposure. The writers who have chronicled these “vulnerables” — and to a large extent the “vulnerables” themselves — resist exploiting the experiences they have somehow survived. Although Mahindan grieves his wife and his dead family, he tempers that grief with a stoically determined optimism. In fact, the word “grief” occurs but a few times in the novel, and never melodramatically. Mahindan allows himself to be overcome only when he has complete privacy, in the shower room:
He stood under the piercing spray, water pouring over his face, camouflaging his tears, his frustration at being trapped, the growing dread he’d made an irreparable mistake, his homesickness and grief for every person he’d ever known and loved, the pain of the water raining down like a thousand knives, all of it mixing together. (322–323)
Similarly, in Lives of the Family, textures of despair and loneliness interweave with fortitude and resolve: “As is the nature of families, the layers of guilt and blame, remorse and regret become, in the end, fictions that torment” (101). But the very restraint that resists assumptions raised by the scholarship of abjection. The stigmata of suffering might be expected as a display, but its private forbearance embodies transfiguration.
Accountable here is certainly the extent to which the need for an “audience” to watch migrants “perform” their precarity imbues both historical, fictional, and legal rituals. These texts explore the instability of being untethered from fixed relationality by requiring the telling and re-telling of the migrant’s past, arrival, motivation, and genealogy. Vulnerability then becomes a role that must be both inhabited and acted. In The Boat People, the body who sits in front of the Admissibility Board is expected to perform as the same body in front of the Detention Review Board and then expected to perform as the same body in front of the Immigration and Refugee Board (57). Living bodies cannot necessarily demonstrate innocence or guilt, although each person is expected to stage transparently the circumstances of their education, language, and clothing. Most important of all, the story of why they are refugees, and why they wish asylum must strike a balance between visibility and believability, a concoction marking the subject as pitiable. This veritable theatre becomes a place where adjudicators grill “the claimant on every detail of their story” (57). Although the bureaucracy presumes that the bodies of the refugees will be housed and clothed, the same bureaucracy does not witness their psychic transitions. Priya (the immigration lawyer) wonders: “Would the adjudicators be more sympathetic if they saw the refugees as she had, filthy and shattered, disembarking at Esquimalt?” (60). Sceptical voyeurs listening to the stories they are told, the hearings room performs as panopticon of a cumbersome system, with the two Immigration lawyers, the Border Services lawyer, and the adjudicator, as well as myriad others. Bala notes: “It was a full house: the reporters, a stenographer, a sketch artist, and a white-blond man” (61), the latter serving as an interpreter. Such is the forensic observation that presides over the petitioning vulnerable.
While the Chinese “sojourners” in Chong’s text confront an earlier bureaucracy, their legal detention is equally regimented, and under the “Rules for Asiatics”, Chinese immigration is carefully controlled (5). Indeed, “Canadian Immigration officers posted in the British colony of Hong Kong […] tried to trip them up in order to determine if they were who they claimed to be, to see if their answers squared with the answers given by their sponsors” (12). Again, it is the performance of identity that inscribes the successful outcome of the body’s migration, whether as child or bride, paper son or brother. Other transformations were expected as well; Chong reports an item in the Perth Courier in 1899: “six Chinese laundrymen in town had been naturalized and received Anglo-Saxon surnames” (54). So many of the experiences of these vulnerable bodies are lost in translation; and even scars are made invisible. If performing difference is what is expected, then that performance will be rehearsed.
And even successful transformation cannot forget. In Blue Sunflower Startle, Ladha recites how the malice and cruelty of the past in Tanzania erupts as a reminder of what was left behind. “I have never returned. The rancour is still there” (161). She is haunted by her first home, and its memorable imprint. “Even under a blue bin sky, traces of a stompy orange home exist. A ghost. Even after a banishment of over thirty-five years, Swahili is still my liver” (162). She acknowledges what cannot be measured: the past and how its tenderness shapes humans. That same body (liver) commits to a trembling strength that carries embodied vulnerability toward a future revisitation of the same power.
Conclusion
It might be tempting to conclude that narratives of immigration effectively contribute to officially endorsed success stories, conflicting with what individual bodies actually experience. Although The Boat People cites Prime Minister Mulroney’s comment that, “Canada is not in the business of turning refugees away” (qtd. in Bala, 2018: 119; emphasis in original), scrutiny of that marked creature, “the refugee” or “the immigrant”, continues, a political exposition fearful of and yet eager to exploit the very vulnerability of those who seek safety. In Blue Sunflower Startle, “Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada takes in planeloads of refugees from Uganda” (75) but that does not settle antagonism to Indo-Africans. The sheer persistence of the chronicle of migrancy, its interpolation in the history of Canada, has inscribed a new ontology. Still, it is important to ask if that master narrative explicates a sufficient response to precarity. Does Canadian fetishization of migrant, refugee, and newcomer literature amplify those “shifting notions of who belongs and who does not in the national body politic” (Mukherjee, 2011: 387)? And can that story be revised, usurped, or commuted if the undocumented are not supported by the “official” story? “If we think of vulnerability as a radical openness toward unexpected outcomes, then we might be able to engage it more creatively — as a space to work from and not only as something to be overcome” (Hirsch, 2019: n.p.). Is the transformation that Hirsch identifies achievable? That is certainly the conundrum for the immigrant story, for the migrant who steps toward “unexpected outcomes”, but must negotiate that space with both physical and aesthetic dexterity.
Even in the spatial dysfunctionalities of legal and social discrimination, the twenty-first century demands a means of measuring this ongoing limbo, where Chong (2013) observes, “for the migrant, to leave one shore and to arrive at another is neither the beginning nor the end. If they should be so lucky, they’d become part of the […] negotiation between the familiar and the strange, the old and the new” (213). That hopeful impetus does not account for the axiomatic drive of the fleeing refugee, whose bargaining power is only as good as the persistence of a good story, or for the immigrants who are able to transport wealth. Difficult as it is to encompass vulnerability beyond our prescribed conception of social and material relations, the naming, marking, and observation of the migrant story in Canada proposes the very crux of resistance and precarity, the strength of vulnerability. We must not forget the extent to which vulnerability acts as an instrument and a weapon, as well as an act of exclusion. And within those parameters, the importance of examining flight, expectation, fate, disappointment, accident, and erasure, becomes the provenance of all migrants. “One can imagine, for a moment, the process of immigration as similar to passage through a sieve that separates two worlds, the homeland from the new world”, says Chong (175). That passage is less the metal filter of the device than it is the air between the mesh perforations, the absence which enables the straining of departure from arrival. It is in the vulnerability of that unnameable and ineffable gap that Hirsch’s “radical openness toward unexpected outcomes” can be rehearsed.
